Three Great Novels (3 page)
Read Three Great Novels Online
Authors: Henry Porter
Tags: #Thrillers, #Action & Adventure, #Fiction
She put her hands to her mouth, aware that her mind was tripping over something. ‘That’s not the same man,’ she said, without consciously understanding what had produced such certainty. ‘That’s not bloody Rahe!’ Vehemence made her voice rise.
‘Right gate,’ said the controller, yawning. ‘And the jacket - I doubt there’re two jackets like that on the planet, let alone in this airport.’
‘It’s the same jacket,’ she snapped, banging the desk with her hand. ‘But it’s not him. Rahe is right-handed. When he gave his passport to the woman at check-in he took it from the left breast pocket with his right hand. Here he’s using his left hand to take the boarding card out of his right pocket,’ she said, jabbing at the screen. ‘Look! He changed the bags over so he could do that. Even from behind you can see they’re different - this man’s got a narrower head, a longer neck. He’s thinning at the crown.’
The supervisor leaned into the screen. ‘Maybe you’re right. But the angle’s not too clever up there. We had to shift our cameras because of work on the cabling ducts for the visual recognition system. It’s a shame we don’t have a head-on shot of him there.’ He knew she was right.
‘I’ve been following Youssef Rahe all bloody morning and that’s not him.’
They went back over the footage of Rahe in duty free, and noted how he walked away from the camera with short paces in which his feet veered outwards as they came down. The man who had just boarded KU102 walked with a definite roll and his arms worked more as he went along. There was a further, clinching anomaly. As Rahe waited in duty free he looked at his watch several times, thrusting his wrist out of his sleeve and revolving the gold strap which hung loose like a bracelet on his wrist. The man at the boarding gate appeared not to be wearing a watch, at least not one that could be seen below the sleeve of his jacket, nor as his left hand reached up and plucked the passport and boarding card from his inside pocket. Admittedly, they were seeing him from above and behind, but there was no doubt that while Herrick caught a flash of shirt cuff in this movement she could not see a watch.
She didn’t need any further confirmation. She dialled the direct line to the operations room at the Security Services. ‘Youssef Rahe didn’t get on his plane. There was a stand-in. Rahe may be your problem.’
Route Three took the convoy of cars from the north perimeter road westwards towards Terminal Four along a canyon formed by tall leylandii bushes and noise barriers at the edge of the airport. They travelled at 80 mph with the Range Rover sitting within a few feet of the Jaguar’s offside rear bumper. One false move by the Prime Minister’s driver, Jim Needpath, and there would certainly be an accident, but he had worked with the protection officer in the Range Rover before. Out in front, five police outriders leapfrogged each other and raced past the convoy of cars to hold up traffic at every intersection. As they came to the roundabout near Terminal Four, they turned left and doubled back along the A30 towards London, the plan being to cross over to the M4 motorway by a dual carriageway and make their way to central London using the fast lane reserved for buses and taxis.
Inside the Jaguar, Chambers was on the radio, demanding to know why there was no sign of the police helicopter that was going to act as a pathfinder into central London. The sardonic reply came back that it was generally considered poor aviation practice to place a surveillance aircraft in the main flight path into Heathrow. At this Norquist smiled and looked out at the dismal housing estate rushing by - people walking with their heads bowed to the rain, a pair of cyclists struggling along in cagoules and an Indian woman sheltering her kid in the folds of her sari. He wondered briefly how the Brits managed to keep their sense of humour in this climate.
The outriders shepherded the motorcade smoothly through the roundabout under the M4 before the four cars rose on a slip road to join the motorway. Two motorcyclists stayed just in front of the Jaguar while the other three formed a chevron to snowplough the traffic out of the fast lane with their sirens and lights. At this point the helicopter appeared and hovered for a second or two at about 1,000 feet before spinning round to join the flow of traffic eastwards. Llewellyn was patched through to the pilot and told him that he needed an exact description of the traffic conditions ahead, and a warning about vehicles parked on the hard shoulder and on or under bridges.
The road was unusually clear and they covered the four-mile stretch quickly, with the pilot giving regular snatches of laconic commentary. Suddenly an interested note entered his voice and he told them he was going to take a look at a white lorry that had pulled up about a mile in front of them at the beginning of the elevated section. As they rounded a bend they saw the truck with the helicopter positioned above it. Llewellyn told the drivers to reduce their speed and then sent the three motorcycles on to investigate.
‘What do you see?’ he asked the pilot.
‘There’s just one man in there,’ came the reply. ‘I’m taking her down a bit. He looks Asian, but I can’t be sure. He’s not responding to anything we do. He looks a bit freaked.’
They saw the helicopter descend on the left of the motorway.
‘Hold on,’ said the pilot, ‘the lorry’s moving. No. He’s stopped again. He’s put the vehicle across both lanes. You might just squeeze behind him or in front of him, as the cars are doing, but there’s not much room either way.’
‘That’s not an option,’ said Llewellyn. It was fast occurring to him that there were very few options. If they tried to pass the lorry and a device was detonated inside, it would certainly blow them all into the next world. And they could not cross the central reservation to the westbound carriageway or mount the bank to their left, which was fringed with dense hawthorn trees. Reversing up the hard shoulder to the service station a mile or so back was the only way left to them, unless the lorry moved of its own accord.
By now the Jaguar and its escort had slowed to 35 mph. The traffic that had been held up behind the lorry had all slipped through the gap and a stretch of about 800 yards of open road lay ahead of them. The two remaining police outriders had dropped back to prevent anyone overtaking the convoy.
‘Shit,’ said Llewellyn. ‘This is a fucking mess.’
‘If you can keep this part of the motorway clear,’ said Chambers, ‘you could bring the chopper down and we can hitch a ride.’
‘Let’s do that,’ said Norquist, his voice moving from compliance to command.
The pilot heard this in the cacophony that was now reaching him from central control, but he had other things on his mind. ‘You’ve got two vans approaching from behind - a red Transit and a dark blue Toyota. They’re about half a mile along the bus lane and closing fast. I’ll come down and get you, but the wind isn’t good for this kind of thing and you’ve got to do something about those vehicles.’
Llewellyn told the drivers of the two unmarked escort vehicles to fall back and prepare to block the vans, forcing them off the road if necessary. He knew the conversation was being heard in New Scotland Yard and he told them very deliberately to open fire if they judged it to be the only way of stopping the two vans. He was now convinced that an attempt on Norquist’s life was in progress and he said as much to New Scotland Yard, adding that it wasn’t effing well going to happen on his watch.
The Jaguar and Range Rover shot forward over the next seventy yards then coasted along the hard shoulder, reducing their speed to almost walking pace. Jim Needpath’s eyes moved from his wing mirror to the lorry, every part of his being jangling with the imperative to take flight, to bolt from the situation and save his passengers. In front of them they saw the driver of the truck jump down from the cab, run the few yards to the side of the deserted carriageway and scramble up a bank towards the breaking wave of hawthorn blossom. Two of the three police motorcyclists brought their machines to a halt just before a narrow rail bridge over the motorway, kicked them back on their stands and set off in pursuit of the driver. The third drove up to the truck, circled it and accelerated away shouting in his helmet microphone that a liquid was seeping onto the road from the side of the truck. The vehicle was an Iveco diesel but the liquid smelled like petrol.
The helicopter pilot took matters into his own hands and decided to land on the motorway. The aircraft swooped over the rail bridge and flew at a height of a hundred feet towards the Jaguar, throwing up a storm of spray in its wake. At the exact moment that he lifted his nose and settled the aircraft onto the tarmac, the red Transit burst along the hard shoulder followed by the police BMW. The driver of the Range Rover saw what was happening, slammed his vehicle into reverse and went to meet the van, colliding with it a second or two later.
Needpath didn’t wait any longer. He shot the Jaguar forward to the helicopter, pulling the car round with a handbrake turn so that Norquist’s side was protected from whatever was going on behind them, which was not at all clear because of the roar of the engine and the swirling clouds of spindrift. Llewellyn and Chambers got out, dragged Norquist from his seat and pushed him towards the helicopter, ducking under the rotor blades. They were halfway there when the Toyota van appeared through the mist and hit the Jaguar on its flank, just behind Jim Needpath’s seat, and caused it to spin round. The Ford saloon carrying four Special Branch police officers was not far behind, but it slewed to a halt without hitting either car and disgorged at least three of the policemen, who began to shoot at the van. The same thing had occurred on the hard shoulder after the Range Rover launched itself backwards into the red Transit van.
Llewellyn and Chambers didn’t wait to witness the battle on the motorway. As they lifted Norquist through the door of the helicopter, a shot glanced off the hard perspex in front of the pilot. Chambers had just scrambled in behind Norquist when the helicopter rose, tipped forward and roared away.
They climbed to 1,000 feet before the co-pilot turned round to check that his passengers were strapped in and saw blood was coming from a wound in Norquist’s neck.
He was already unconscious.
CHAPTER TWO
On a grassy bank running down to a swollen stream about ten miles from the Albanian border, a man dozed in the morning light. The sun had not yet risen above the hill in front of him so the ground and his bedding were still wet. For some time he had been aware of his travelling companions moving around him, packing and rolling up the sheets which they’d hung between the bushes to give shelter. They coughed and grumbled to each other, mostly in languages he didn’t understand. But the sounds of the camp breaking in the early morning were familiar - men stiff from a night in the open, wondering how they found themselves without bed, food or a good woman.
Someone was prodding the campfire into life. At first he didn’t understand why: they’d eaten the last of the food the night before - dried lamb and a broth made from chicken bones - and he knew there was no coffee or tea. Then he smelled the mint and remembered they’d gathered it in a ditch the night before. They’d made mint tea and now one of them was beside him, nudging the back of his hand with a warm tin cup. He opened an eye to see a grin of chipped teeth, spreading in an unwashed, slightly pock-marked face: the youngest of the three Kurds, an amiable character who was always jollying the others on. He said in English, ‘Drink, mister, for your health.’
The party began to move off down the bank towards the track, but he still couldn’t bring himself to jump up and follow. The delicious memory of his dream was still fresh and part of him didn’t want to leave it behind. He watched shafts of light moving over the hill to catch the top of a tree nearby. A tiny bird, one that he had never seen before, was flitting to and from a vine that had become detached from the tree. Each time it arrived to perch on the twig, it bobbed up and down, checking the area for predators before diving into the shade of the vine to feed its young. He realised the bird must have been there all night, within a few yards of the fire and the men under the shelters, and he marvelled at its nerve and discretion.
At length the sunlight fell on the ground above him and he shook himself from his reverie, stood up and stretched. He had only a few possessions and it didn’t take long for him to bundle them up and tie them together with the belt that he’d kept with him these past six years. As he made his way down the bank, slipping on the damp grass, the men’s voices were brought to him on a soft, warm wind. It would be a good day, he thought. Yes, they were due some luck after all that had happened to them. Maybe they would find a way of crossing the border into Greece without being arrested and treated like dirt.
In the past he might have prayed to Allah. Now it did not even occur to him. After so long in the holy war the Western part of him was reasserting itself. He was leaving the wilderness and the barbarity behind and he was taking back his old name - Karim Khan - and with it the hope of finding the young medical student, who drank alcohol and loved and charmed but who was no less in awe of the Prophet because of these activities. Belief had not deserted him, but faith in sacrifice had gone, along with the
nomme de guerre
- Mujahad, or soldier of Islam - and just now he would rely on himself and not God’s will.
nomme de guerre
- Mujahad, or soldier of Islam - and just now he would rely on himself and not God’s will.
He climbed down on to the track and noticed the bunches of twigs that had collected in the ruts along the road, borne there by the rainwater of the day before. Beetles were feeding on insects drowned in the storm. The pulverised rock in the road’s surface sparkled with chips of quartz. Everything seemed beautiful and in its place that morning, and he felt a surge of optimism. He shuddered at the words that had taken him to war: ‘Allah has conferred on those who fight with their wealth and their lives a higher rank than those who stay at home.’
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